It feels like Google has invested some in the product, but not enough. "There was a significant advance made by Google last year, the first one in 8 years. It was a re-skin. The back-button works now. "

There's an industry-wide fear that "Google has their own agenda in terms of wanting to roll out their own tools, change the process."

A source close to senior executives at Google and DoubleClick said:

SAI is hearing from bitter employees. People who are happy don't take the time to write novels about why they're happy.

DoubleClick engineers and product people are doing well at Google. They are the people running Google's display business.

DoubleClick sales and support people are not doing well at Google. From Google's POV they don't matter as much.

Clients get unhappy because "there's a level of built-in and permanent unhappiness among ad-serving clients. You're serving a standardized thing to people who think their business is special."

Clients are unhappy because they don't feel like they have a viable alternative. Microsoft has nuked Atlas.

Google spent $3 billion on DoubleClick and it will do $2 billion in revenue this year. The deal is working.

Google is investing plenty in the product. They just bought Teracent.

Google is a bit behind real-time optimizers like AppNexus and Media Math, but it'll probably buy or build a competitor eventually.

A Google spokesperson told us:

"Input from agency clients about their product needs is a huge part of our product design process. We've consulted with all the agency holding companies - and dozens of other clients - ahead of all of our DFA upgrades. If this person wants to call us, or join these meetings, we'd love his feedback. Over the past 12 months, Google has put enormous resources into updating and innovating the buy-side platform for agencies. Our innovations in this area include:

Our next-generation DFA system ("DFA6") which includes a much faster and easier-to-use work flow, the industry's only webservices API, and numerous new trafficking features;

The beta release of a brand new reporting solution, DFA Analytics, based on the Google Analytics technology;

Account integration with Google Ad Planner, allowing DFA clients to share media plans and organize data according to their established business logic. Or they can of course continue to use their existing media planning tools."